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Will the NFL go back to being its more brutal old self under Donald Trump? #NFL

The president-elect has been clear about his contempt for softer rules in Americas most lucrative sport. Will that effect the fight against brain trauma?Earlier this November, an NFL executive gave a fascinating, if bewildering, quote to Bleacher Reports Mike Freeman regarding the future of the nations most popular sports league under Donald Trump.

Under President [Barack] Obama, the country was intellectual and looked at facts. I think thats why our ratings fell, said the anonymous executive. People read a lot about our scandals or CTE and didnt like what they saw. Under Trump, the country will care less about truth or facts. Itll be [more raw] and brutal. Football will be more of an outlet. Well go back to liking our violent sports.

On the campaign trail, Trump spoke out about his distaste for the NFLs recent rule changes, made to prioritize safety and protect players from head injuries. In October, when a woman fainted at one of Trumps rallies but returned after receiving medical attention, Trump declared, That woman was out cold and now shes coming back. See? We dont go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussion. Oh no! Got a little ding on the head. No, no, you cant play for the rest of the season. Our people are tough.

It echoed a sentiment from a Trump speech during primary season back in January. So Im watching the game yesterday. What used to be considered a great tackle, a violent, head-on, violent. If that was done by Dick Butkus, theyd say hes the greatest player … if that was done by Lawrence Taylor, it WAS done by Lawrence Taylor and Dick Butkus! … and Ray Nitschke, right? You used to see these tackles, and it was incredible to watch. Now they [effeminate voice] tackle … head on head collision … 15-yard penalty. The whole game is all screwed up!

For Trump, football served as a perfect example of why America needed to be Made Great Again. As Trump tells it, America is losing the toughness it had in the days of real men like Taylor, who is currently serving probation for pleading guilty to sexual misconduct. Trumps promise to restore that kind of toughness to a nation seen as gone soft was a major part of his appeal for many of the white men who supported him and made up by far his largest voting block.

Natalia Petrzela, assistant professor of history at The New School, says this treatment of football has a grand tradition in Americas political history. Positioning football as under attack by meddling, effeminate liberals rules about contact and violence, letting little girls play, insisting on repercussions for players who are violent off the field, Petrzela wrote via e-mail, is a vivid way of making a broader point about the unfortunate feminization of American culture that has been a plank of American conservatism for decades. But its important to note that this version of masculinity is not all about unrestrained savagery; football is also seen as encouraging hard work, sportsmanship, and discipline, other values seen to be under attack. The trick for politicians is to tie all these things together, for which football is uniquely suited.

Populist presidents in particular have seized on football as a political tool. Teddy Roosevelt championed the game for its ability to ward off creeping feminization of Americas youth in what he saw as a sedentary age. The sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk, Roosevelt wrote in 1893 for Harpers Weekly. It is mere unmanly folly to do away with the sport because the risk exists.

Ronald Reagan, of course, was known for his performance as Notre Dame football coach George Gipp in the film Knute Rockne, All American before beginning his political career. He praised football for its ability to engender clean hatred, telling the Washington Post: It is the last thing left in civilization where two men can literally fling themselves bodily at each other in combat and not be at war. You hate the color of his jersey, but theres a mutual respect that develops while youre playing on the field.

But perhaps no politician used football like Max Rafferty, a populist conservative in 1960s California state politics. Rafferty passionately celebrated football as one of the few legitimate forms of campus activity that built moral and physical strength, Petrzela writes, as opposed to the walkouts and demonstrations he denigrated as representing an opposite sensibility.

Rafferty was not always a Trump-esque politician. For example, he initially fought for bilingual education in California schools. But in the late 1960s, as the culture wars reached their peaks, Rafferty came down squarely on the side of traditionalism anti-communist, anti-immigrant, and pro-authority. He saw patriotism as an emotional duty and believed football and fraternities were the only true and positive forms of campus organization. And in response to the idea that programs such as Spanish classes were necessary for the Latino students in Californias public schools, Rafferty took the position that education was there to perpetuate the cultural heritage of the race. Or, you might say, Rafferty thought education was there to serve as a cultural wall.

Football was part of that platform for Rafferty, a keystone in his cultural wall. The late 1960s saw football go through an injury crisis similar to todays after 36 high school kids died on the playing field in one horrific season in 1968. Despite those deaths, Rafferty espoused the values of the game in a speech in front of the 1969 California State Conference of Athletic Directors. He warned against the threat posed to football by leftist agitators. But he added, Im not too worried about the outcome. The love of clean, competitive sports is too deeply embedded in the American matrix, too much a part of the warp and woof of our free people, ever to surrender to the burning-eyed, bearded draft-card-burners who hate and envy the athlete because he is something they can never be a man.

As Petrzela writes: It seems that especially in contentious moments, football is prized as a bastion of traditional, masculine, sensibilities that are themselves under threat. Whether that threat is real or perceived doesnt necessarily matter. In Raffertys generation, there was a kind of moral revulsion at what he called The Sick 60s boys wearing long hair, kids protesting the US government and walking out of school, and drug use. Today, we see Trump fanning similar disgust about campus politics: young people questioning the gender binary, demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces and the climate of political correctness that has moved out of educational contexts to the broader culture.

Will our anonymous NFL executives prediction of a football renaissance in Trumps America prove true? Its hard to say. With regards to concussions and CTE, Pandoras Box has already been opened. Growing numbers of American parents are saying they would not allow their children to play football, undoubtedly influenced by the steady stream of reports of CTE findings in deceased football players youths and professionals alike. Trump cant stop that alone. But will the research into concussions, often funded with federal dollars, continue under his administration? And certainly any movement into ending youth football in public schools, as two University of Minnesota bioethicists have proposed, would struggle to gain traction in a government helmed by Trump.

If Trumps election taught us anything, its that predictions about his ability to shape public consciousness are precarious, Petrzela writes. I do think that it will be hard for him to push back on the safety regulations for younger players, since the science is persuasive and it is hard to convince parents, no matter their politics, that subjecting to their children to potential brain injury in service of building character is defensible, much less desirable. But in Trumps America, who knows?